March 6, 2013

Working with bioengineers and neurosurgeons, Daniel Lim, a neurosurgeon and stem-cell scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has designed a needle that bends for for delivering stem cells to the brain, Nature News reports.

The device can deposit cells anywhere within a 2-centimetre radius along a track, a volume bigger than an entire mouse brain.

Several researchers hope to use Lim’s device for clinical trials in brain cancer and neurodegenerative disease.

Lim’s device could cut down on the number of injections required for cell treatments and give more precise control of the volume of cells delivered and ensure that the cells delivered into the brain stay in the brain, avoiding the problem of reflux, in which cells injected using straight needles flow back out to the brain surface along the needle’s path.

Also, unlike other needles used for cell therapies, Lim’s device contains no ferromagnetic metals and so is compatible with MRI.

When you put the head of a sociopath into an fMRI, you see that they are missing the parts of the brain that the rest of us feel love and empathy with. There is nothing there, just a void filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Maybe one day Daniel Lim could inject stem cells into such a void an allow a Machiavellian to grow a conscience.

But before that, repairing the damage done by neurodegenerative disease will be a benefit that allows the rest of us to keep our wits about us while waiting for the Singularity.

At some point in the future the arc of adjusting brain chemistry and design will intersect with societies need to avoid the future Unibomber with a grand plan. As with many best laid plans of mice and men, curing natural defects will have some effect of what is considered personal freedom. And so it still goes.

Yes, but such groups need empowerment, at least stronger voices, and this should come from the individual conscientious choices of an educated citizenry. Other voices, political, national, theological, ideological, etc., prevail when such choices are influenced unduly by the group, the society, and the lack of social, civic, historical, and STEM education.